The
Francophone Women’s Magazine inside and outside France
provides an interdisciplinary approach to reading and interpreting
francophone women’s magazines through the combined contributions of
literary theorists, linguists and social scientists from North America,
Europe and Africa. Adding another primary source to the expanding field
of media and cultural studies, this edited collection addresses the role
women’s magazines has played in women’s lives historically, from the
French revolution onward, and geographically, as post-colonial
identities form around and against commodified images of women.

This
comprehensive work confronts the feminist question by examining the
degree to which women’s magazines can be considered a woman’s “space.”
While all the magazines analyzed in the collection are commercial in
nature, and thus perpetuating a traditional idea of femininity, they do
provide for both the woman writer and the woman reader a place to engage
and reflect on what it means to be a woman living in a certain place at
a certain time. This collection should provide a useful introduction to
those studying the field of media studies and French studies, but also
to readers curious to explore the pleasure in reading their favorite
glossy.

Annabelle Cone
is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of French and Italian and Comparative
Literature at Dartmouth College (USA). She has published articles on Colette,
Marguerite Duras, Eric Rohmer and on English author and filmmaker Hanif
Kureishi. She was a contributor to the edited volume, Her Space: Women,
Writing, and Solitude (Haworth Press).

Dawn Marley is a Senior Lecturer in French,
Department of Languages and Translation Studies, University of Surrey, UK.
She has published a number of articles and chapters on language attitudes
and issues of language and identity in Morocco and in France.